15-849 Course Resources

Project Management

You should strongly consider using either
Subversion or
CVS
to perform source code control for your project and the paper
you write describing it.

I also strongly suggest writing your course project report using
LaTeX.
It is the de-facto tool in which most CS research papers are written.
While it has a bit of start up cost, it's much easier to
collaboratively write complex research papers using LaTeX than using
word.

Testbeds and Emulation

Emulab

Emulab is a network emulation environment
at the University of Utah. It provides racks of machines and programmable
switches that can be configured to form mostly-arbitrary network topologies,
with controllable delay and loss between nodes. It's a great way to test
real programs in repeatable conditions or at scales that you can't get on
your own.

Emulab also provides a set of wireless nodes that you can control,
located around their building. They also have an experimental mobile
robot testbed that could make for fun projects (the robots are designed
to move computers and radios around so that you can do repeatable experiments
involving mobility).

The RON Testbed

The RON testbed is a 37-node distributed Internet testbed. The nodes
are mostly US centric, but some are located around the globe.
The machines can be used for network measurements or for evaluating
your projects. They're managed through Emulab.
The RON testbed is similar to, but smaller than...

Planetlab

PlanetLab is a large-scale,
distributed collection of machines that can be used for experiments
and measurements. It has about 594 nodes scattered over 282 sites.
The machines run something linux-ish that you can login to and
run programs, and there exist a variety of utilities for automatically
distributing software to the nodes, running programs, and so on.

You must sign up to use a PlanetLab account. Please only sign up if
you're going to use the account, since it imposes some management
overhead on people not involved with the course.

Wireless Nodes

Dave and some of the other faculty have a handful of various wireless
nodes, cards, old laptops, etc., available that you may be able to use
for your projects.

moteLab

moteLab is a wireless sensor
network deployed in the CS building at Harvard. It has 30 sensor
motes that users can upload system images to, collect data from, etc.
To use moteLab, you'll need to send them an email (listed on their
web page). Please CC: dga on the mail.

MistLab

Mistlab
is a wireless testbed with 60 Mica2/Cricket nodes
(sensor boards, much like the motes in moteLab) distributed over the
9th floor in the Stata center at
MIT's Computer Science and AI Lab. For access, see their web
page and send them an email, and please CC: dga on the mail.